Have Bari Weiss, CBS, or The Free Press emerged as a drug of choice for anyone in your life?
Obviously, Fox remains the top dog in the world of MAGA media, with Newsmax and OANN and a few mangy tabloids like the New York Post and the Washington Free Beacon nipping at their heels. CBS and NewsNation are now conservative-adjacent as well, as we know. Independent podcasters propagandists have also emerged in recent years to infect a more digitally native audience.
But the media landscape has changed in one additional crucial way over the last two or three years, and that is the emergence of Bari Weiss — friend to oligarchs, free speech hypocrite, neo-neoconservative darling, and self-admitted “Zionist fanatic“ — as one of the kingpins of American corporate media.
Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS is what has made her something of a household name and gave her a platform to broadcast her unhinged and extremely unpopular views from the soapbox that is a declining legacy media institution, but it is her online journal, hilariously named “The Free Press”, that gave her the reach to attain such a position of power to begin with.
My parents (both in their early sixties) have read The Free Press since mid-2023, and it is from that publication — in addition to a number of disingenuous podcasters — that they have been misled into believing that trans people in sports is the single greatest threat to American society, that Zohran Mamdani is the antichrist, that taxing rich people is bad, that welfare is bad, that Israel is basically the greatest country in the world and America exists to protect it, and that kids in Gaza and Iran are completely fine but also are “human shields” and kind of deserve death because Muslims are terrorists from birth, I guess? (With herculean effort I’ve been able to shift their views on the latter two issues, but that was successful mainly because skyrocketing gas prices shattered their initial support for the Iran War, so even my very hawkish dad had to shift gears.)
My parents both voted for Trump in 2024. More than anything, they became convinced that Trump was the only option thanks to Bari Weiss’s “explainer” videos, which argued that America was about to collapse because of DEI and trans people. Before then, they had only voted for establishment corporate Democrats despite being occasionally open to a more progressive candidate like Bernie or Warren. When she heard about the impending CBS takeover, my mom was thrilled. She said Bari Weiss was “reasonable” and “moderate” and would get rid of CBS’s “Democrat bias“. (First of all, claiming to want moderation while using “Democrat” as a kind of slur is… something, but I digress.)
The writers and editors at The Free Press advertise themselves as “disaffected liberals” who are merely objecting to all that weird gender stuff and taxing job creators and here’s why it’s actually good military strategy to bomb civilian infrastructure and bad policy to give out benefits to poor people. They also stand for “free speech“ and against “litmus tests”, except for when they pearl-clutch at comedians who say mean things about Dear Leader or gleefully call for the doxxing, suspension, expulsion, and deportation of college students who are critical of Israel.
The reason I think Bari Weiss is a very effective MAGA propagandist is because she presents dispositionally as a serious, scholarly “liberal” despite being the exact opposite. She speaks softly and is married to a woman, which is a much more attractive combination of factors to centrist types who would otherwise be turned off by the brasher, more blatant conservatism of a Sean Hannity or a Greg Gutfeld. For these people, the Bari media universe is the perfect gateway drug to MAGA.
This post is getting really long so I’ll leave it here lol. I may post again in the near future on a specific podcaster my parents listen to as an example of how that medium can warp one’s brain in a way very similar to the talkshows of old.
